I'm guessing here but I think dysfunctional families is the norm in most western countries rather than functional families which are probably the anomaly.

And amongst all this dysfunction is a horror story that children are enduring.

We adults prefer to live in some kind of fantasy that everything is rosy if only we just don't talk about it.

Whether it is the result of stupid parents demanding their second amendment right to leave loaded guns around because well you know, it's their right, to fathers or step-fathers thinking their kids are 'asking for it' to inappropriate touching - to abuse and violence on the TV every night because it sells air time to corporate advertisers.

Why do we prefer to ignore the reality that there are a lot of really bad families out there?

And I think it's because it's incredibly difficult to talk about.

A friend of mine told me a friend of hers accused her of raping him - yes this is a man falsely accusing a woman of raping him. The friend of mine had never met the person who accused her of raping him - there could be no possible evidence of the rape possibly ever occurring. Anyway my friend told me she would tell a mutual friend (of theirs) about the alleged rape and the person she told was a man - the accusation did actually occur, the rape did not.

And my friend reported to me how awkward she felt telling another person about rape accusation. She asked the person she told how he felt about what he told her and he said he didn't want to believe it but he was less trustful of the person since my friend told him this mans false accusation.

My friend since told me that the man who accused her of raping him had tried to contact her via email but never apologized for saying such a horrific thing to her, so she thought it was him just trying to control her again, but that is no excuse for this man's dreadful behavior.

All these things are awful - we don't want to believe that those we give power to are capable of behaving so badly so its not surprising that when we tell our truths people don't want to believe us. But we must tell our truths because otherwise people will believe they do not happen.

I've heard of women believing that all rape was made up because they'd only ever heard of women supposedly falsely accusing men of rape - that was until women started telling her that they'd been raped.

The horrors that are happening are happening all the time and unless we tell people they are happening people won't know that they are.